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See Need, Publish Answer in Three Months

When Twitter’s popularity took a big turn upward at the beginning of the year, OReilly saw an opportunity. Using Powerpoint as the development tool, co-authors Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein created The Twitter Book in a few months. The electronic version came out in April and the print edition followed a month later.

Now, Gina Trapani of Lifehacker fame is doing the same for Google Wave. For this still invite-only product, Trapani with help from Adam Pash has written The Complete Guide to Google Wave. The site went up October 31st, exactly one month after the Google Wave Preview was made available to limited set of users. A preview pdf edition of the guide will be available some time this month and the first edition will be released in print and PDF in January. The Guide has already been covered by The New York Times.

Here are two great examples from both ends of the spectrum–an established (and, yes, progressive) publisher and a self-publication effort–of the short cycles that are now possible with collaborative tools and on-demand production technologies.